Responding to language

Difficulty with understanding humour

A child may present this as a lack of understanding of jokes that are based on double word meanings or a play on words. They may feel socially excluded when they fail to understand the jokes their peers are telling. 

Strategies to support: 

• Target homophone jokes for analysis, targeting jokes where both meanings are known. For example, " What month do soldiers like best?". "March". 
• Explore the double word meanings on which the joke is based. 
• Provide visuals. 
• Retell the joke and give an explicit explanation. 
• Introduce further homophone jokes in a hierarchical way relating to the difficulty. 

Difficulty with reasoning skills

Presenting as confusion over cause, effect and involved 'reasoning sequences'. A child may have difficulty assigning meaning to visual information and identifying similarities and differences. They may also struggle to solve problems that require understanding concepts. 

A child might have difficulty interpreting verbal information and have difficulty understanding word problems in maths while having the ability to calculate using numbers. 

They may present with slowed information presenting and a lack of logic, have difficulty in using meta-cognition (thinking about thinking) and struggle taking/understanding another person's perspective. 

Social communication with peers could be difficult including having an altercation with someone else as they cannot follow their reasoning. A child could also have difficulty with a wide range of more advanced skills too, for example, making rational decisions based on evidence rather than prejudice.  

Strategies to support:

• Build reasoning skills from a low base, asking whether the child can match the concept (things that go together). Can they detect similarities/differences or classify objects. These skills should be developed as a first step. 
• Support with the identification of cause and effect. Use picture descriptions of what happened and the outcome as a result of this. The child can show this by ordering two picture sequences. 
• Support with the reasoning to interpret individual and sequential pictures. 
• Provide extended thinking time when giving reasoning tasks. 
• Provide thought bubbles accompanying pictures for the child to draw what the person is thinking relevant to the situation in the picture. 

Difficulty following non-explicit and changing rules 

This could be presented by the child showing an inability to follow a set of rules or instructions. This is especially difficult when trying to follow the rules of a playground game where there is no explicit explanation available. This can lead to social exclusion. 

Strategies to support:

• Play simple rule-based table-top games. Build this up gradually to more complex games. 
• Ensure all materials and actions in the game can be named. 
• Work on any difficult concepts using visuals to support your explanations. 
• Make each step of the game as explicit as possible. 
• Plan out step by step with visuals. 
• Test out understanding with "What if...?" tasks and scenarios.

Difficulty with inferential understanding

A child could present this by being unable to work out the underlying meaning or draw conclusions from pieces of information given. They may fail to understand the 'bigger picture' in situations like understanding the moral of a story. 

They may tend to take a literal understanding of what is being said, misunderstanding what is being said or misinterpreting the intention of what is being said. A child might present confusion or uncertainty as the child is aware they don't understand it. 

Strategies to support:

• Remember to work in all three mediums - visual, auditory and through reading.
• Give pictures and ask inferential questions. For example: Where are the people? How do you know? Or "What in the picture tells us that...?". 
• Give sentences using the word 'it'. The child will have to identify the 'it' from other information in the sentence. For example, "It escaped when my sister left the hutch door open". Make explicit the keywords that allowed us to infer the answer. 
• Give short written texts and ask inferential questions. Use highlighters to help make explicit the keywords that will lead to drawing the inference as a stepping stone to independent success. 
• Ensure the task is within the child's capability. 

Difficulty understanding non-literal language

A child may show this as a revelation. They could be completely unaware of idioms and may not make sense of idioms such as "caught red-handed" and "pull your socks up". 

Strategies to support:

• Draw attention to idioms and teach about the literal and hidden meaning. Create a picture of the literal meaning, this helps to remember the idiom and introduces humour. For example, "raining cats and dogs" and "pie in the sky". 
• Explain that groups of words can have different meanings, the same as individual words can. 
• Teach some contexts that idioms may be used in and give scenarios for the child to match to idioms they have learnt. 
• Support to spot new idioms seen in writing, or heard being used in conversations. 
• Remind the child of their active listening skills and encourage them to ask what it means. See if there are any other context clues. 
• Make a log of what idioms were used, who used them and the context in which they were used. 

Difficulty following taught routines

A child may present this difficulty as struggling to remember what has been asked of them, struggling with organisation and appearing vague and/or helpless. They may have difficulties organising their thoughts, managing their time and planning/knowing how to get things done. 

Strategies to support: 

• Be tolerant. Don't show exasperation at the child's failure to carry out the simplest of routines, even when they are carried out on a daily basis. 
• Support with visual/picture step-by-step planners. 
• Support by listening to the child verbalising the steps required on the planner. 
• When this is going well challenge the child to follow the routine by imagining the steps, with the planner turned over. 
• Give materials for the next step in a lesson. See if the child can infer what is to be done with them. 
• Lead and let the child complete a routine. 
• Praise for any degree of success.